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twenty five swiss
francs and a coconut for free
by Lars Bang Larsen
In the autumn of
1998, at the Fri-Art kunsthalle in the sub-alpine city Fribourg,
the Danish artist Jens Haaning opened Super Discount, a gallery-space-cum-supermarket,
with groceries and luxury items alike sold 40-60 per cent below
Swiss market value (free coconuts were also distributed to customers
spending more than 25 Swiss francs). Super Discount quickly gained
a reputation among the thrifty citizens of Fribourg. In the morning,
old ladies would queue up in front of the Kunsthalle, eager to raid
the exhibition material, purchased in neighboring France with Haaning's
production budget. A wry model of emergent consumption patterns
in and around the European Union (France is in, Switzerland is not),
Super Discount also worked on a more visceral level - that of palm-sweating
anxiety. For as the exhibition progressed, and goods that sold out
went unreplenished, a feeling of impending crisis set in, the fear
that the system could not accommodate into infinity even the most
basis of needs.
Meanwhile, in the Migros Institute in Zürich, Rikrit Tiravanija
presented a solo show, Das Soziale Kapital. Here, the supermarket
in question was an authorized readymade put at the artist's disposal
by the Institute's sponsor, the Swiss supermarket chain Migros.
Among fruit stalls, freezer compartments, and shelves stacked high
with toilet paper, Tiravanija orchestrated highlights from the Institute's
collection (Hanne Dorboven, Gilbert & George, Richard Long, Dan
Flavin, and Thomas Schütte, among others). These supplemented
an extensive presentation of Taravanija's own works: leftovers from
a Rirkrit meal, a beanbag reading environment, video projections,
an unemployed person sewing Rirkrit feedbags, and a quasi-mechanic's
workshop, where the artist's car was being taken care of. Das Soziale
Kapital comprised an impressive inventory of '90s formal strategies:
real-life as well as art historical appropriation, process-oriented
installation, social design, and so forth. Shopping was not particularly
favorable in Tiravanija's supermarket, though: Migros goods were
sold at market value - which, in Switzerland, isn't exactly a bargain.
If Das Soziale Kapital and Super Discount were to some extent analogous
projects, initial appearance ultimately proved deceptive. Whereas
Tiravanija posited the supermarket as an articulation of an art
historical axis and an occasion to enact a certain formal virtuosity,
Haaning cast the art institution's resources into public space -
more specifically, the sphere of economic speculation. The respective
premises of the projects were, then, discursive continuity in the
aesthetic field versus an integrated, socialaesthetic gesture. Das
Soziale Kapital insisted on cultural surplus and art as consumption,
whereas Super Discount - true both to Haaning's sense of humor and
his radical interdisciplinarity - was about saving a buck, and getting
by.
Joseph Beuys endures, but Tiravanija and Haaning tweak his legacy
toward different ends. Tiravanija lifts Beuys's universalist, aesthetic-democratic
philosophy for the title of his show. Haaning's market speculation,
however, is aligned with the German master's more frivolous side,
part and parcel of the charlatanism that surfaced in connection
to his unlikely myth of survival during WWII - not to mention the
whisky commercial he starred in for Japanese TV in 1982 in order
to raise funds for his Documenta 7 project, 7.000 Acorns (in regard
to his supposed selling-out, Beuys dryly commented that, "My whole
life has been advertising, but one ought to consider what I have
advertised"). Other works by Haaning that integrate economic transactions
include Foreigners Free (1997-98) which, at group shows in various
countries, provided complimentary admission to all non-natives.
In Travel Agency (1997), airline tickets were sold at competitive
prices as art works at Galerie Mehdi Chouakri in Berlin, capitalizing
on German tax laws which exempt art from an 8 per cent VAT. Accompanying
certificates stated that if used for their original purpose, these
tickets ceased to exist as art.
The logic of Travel Agency is that if art is taxed less than other
goods, why not label those other goods "art," this being the prerogative
of the post-Duchampian producer, after all. In Super Discount, nothing
is labeled art as such; nonetheless, as the Kunsthalle resources
were used for the purposes of dispersal, art - more precisely its
institutional apparatus - afforded yet another way to circumvent
the seemingly invulnerable post-capitalist system. By refusing to
valorize high culture, and instead concentrating on realworld economics,
Haaning creates the possibility for realizing and making visible
certain financial transactions. Ideally, cultural and economic significance
are put on equal footing, each invested in the multifold processes
of exchange.
Through a performative negotiation of the white cube and its institutional
ramifications, Haaning circumscribes artistic activity as anti-disciplinary
agency. The poster work Arabic Jokes (unsigned and without reference
to the "City Spaces" exhibition it was a part of) provided an antiimage
of cultural competence, discursively located in the margins of white
Europe. The poster's depiction of a topless, Danish bottle blonde
is accompanied by three jokes in Arabic - an existential one, a
dirty one, and a political one. When distributed around the racially
mixed western borough of Copenhagen in the summer of 1996, it performed
a mutual exclusion on both sides of the fissure of cultural identity:
while the jokes could only be understood by an Arab-speaker, the
blonde as a conspicuously Western type appealed to the self-image
of the "broad-minded" Scandinavian, thus assuring that neither of
the prototypical recipients would be any the wiser with respect
to the poster's ultimate "statement." For both parties - "Arabs"
and "Danes" - any coherent statement was invariably lost on the
cultural other, independent of the posterŐs possible readings as
an Arab warning against intercourse with promiscuous Danish women,
or as a Danish nightclub poster trying to attract a foreign clientele.
Even given its existence as a public art work, Arabic Jokes tentatively
displaced xenophobia from being a question of the social politics
of space to insisting that its real undecidability rests within
an individual horizon of tolerance. The poster's offensive use of
double-edged cultural clichés is - hopefully - cancelled
out by personal understanding. Although it is willing to risk provocation
and racist escalation, Arabic Jokes obstinately trusts in the individual's
judgment. Ii is a work that calls for a revolution of the subject
rather than a revolution of society . though this distinction may
just be a question of where it is most meaningful to begin. "Even
though I live where I was born, I understand myself and my image
of the world as alien," Haanings remarks. "Secondly, one of the
artist's privileges is to be marginalized. This is a condition that
can be employed productively in the face of the art institution.
It is important to me, however, that the work always holds an indication
of being the product of the humor and imagination of an individual,
in order to prevent the artistic model from being a merely analytical
and administrative one, as in the gallery-bashing versions of institutional
critique."
In 1995 and '96, Haaning produced a series of assembly lines, where
a number of people engaged in symbolically charged, but ultimately
undefined activities. In Weapon Production (1995), part of the group
show "RAM" in a Copenhagen suburb, a handful of young immigrants
with some previous experience (so to speak) assisted the artist
in the production of illegal street weapons; in Flag Production
(1996), shown at the "Traffic" show in Bordeaux, France, Asian pupils
from the local art academy sewed flags for an unknown nation. Middelburg
Summer 1996 (1996). a solo show at the De Vleeshal Kunsthalle in
the Dutch city Middelburg, was in a sense the culmination of these
works, in that the activity of the workers wasn't art related in
the first place: Haaning engaged the Turkish-owned clothing factory
Maras Confectie to relocate its production facilities to the Kunsthalle
for the duration of the exhibition. The entire institution was transformed
into an appropriate environment for Maras Confectie's twelve Muslim
(Turkish, Iranian and Bosnian) employees, replete with an office
and canteen, soccer banners and blaring Türkü (a kind
of Turkish blues). As a beholder, you had to adapt to a peripheral
position, as opposed to laying claim to the visual control and leisurely
regulated space that exhibition architecture usually offers. You
were, in fact, trespassing in foreign territory: not only an alien
workplace, but a place where "aliens" work.
Middelburg Summer 1996 provided an episodic mobilization of the
dynamics of the cultural other - or "the world market as readymade,"
as one reviewer put it at the time. The work's critical position
can also be summed up in the words of sociologist John Foran, writing
in the 1997 Theorizing Revolutions: "Oppositional cultures are often
elaborated in contradistinction to the state, but they are also
always rooted in the actual experience of diverse social sectors,
that is, they have an eminently practical dimension." As Fordist
artifacts, assembly lines embody the dimension of physical labor,
which is rapidly becoming obsolescent in the era of immaterial work.
Apart from privileging cultural otherness in a collectively organized
form, Middelburg Summer 1996 rejects art's service relationship
to information society. The work's laconic, somewhat alienating
stageplay resists the communication-driven prescriptions of the
agents of the digital age, along with their (our) continual innovation
of forms and modalities for the commerce of ideas.
Although Haaning's works may be propagandistic at an enunciative
level, the deadpan delivery of their subversive sensibilities and
art institutional allegiances instigates a set of mutual deformations
of incompatible cultural logics. For better or worse, the most dynamic
forms appropriate to the creation of meaning and the chimerical
sense of belonging are the power structures that already exist within
the internationalized economy. For Haaning, art and its institutions
can be negotiated as a framework for confronting these very structures,
as an occasion in which the distance between one personŐs production
and another person's reception is in the same movement re-enacted
and transgressed. Haaning's work implies - when it doesn't insist
- that you should abuse power before it abuses you. at the same
time, it cautions that you should have very good reasons for doing
so, which is perhaps just a very long way of saying, "Know thyself."
Originally published in Art / text, issue 66, August/October 1999
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